A poorly-composed eulogy and some books.

2005-03-03 - 5:29 p.m.

About two weeks ago, a friend (Ryley, I think I've named him. Spelling looks all wrong, but meh) gave me a slender book of short stories called "Screwjack". A few days after I read those stories, I was informed that the author was dead due to self-inflicted wounds.

Before "Screwjack", I only knew of Hunter S. Thompson, mainly from his infamous escapades chronicled in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the movie form, I've yet to read the book). Oh, also, there were those Doonesbury cartoons.

"Screwjack", the longest of the three short stories in the book, is about sex with a cat, sort of. When I was reading it, I wasn't put off by the bestiality thing - at my old job I saw far worse acts described - but I was moved by something. My first comments to the friend who'd loaned me the book were that H.S. Thompson was a cynical writer - too cynical, maybe, for me to appreciate - but that he got to the "truth", whatever and wherever that is.

In reply, my friend gave me Kingdom of Fear, a series of essays and anecdotes and other erratta mostly written in the '90s and early aughts. It's as good an introduction to this man as any, I guess, and I wonder if he was thinking about some of the things he wrote about when he shot himself.

Mostly, though, I've been reflecting on how strange it feels to be introduced to a new author only days before he died. There's an entire body of work ahead of me that I can dive into, but now there's...no more. It feels the same way it did when an acquaintance of my brother's killed himself when we were all in high school (or I was just past), someone I'd met only two or three times, but each of those meetings was filled with some sort of resonance, because I remember them all clearly.

I'm not as cynical as Thompson, nor am I (I think) as angry, and I'm definitely not as violent as he was, in life or in prose. But some of the things that he's angry about, I'm also angry about. I feel like we had some things in common, even if they're things that everyone has in common. And, even though I see the world differently, he got to the truth, and he took the most direct route there. Even his rambling, digressing, bloody anecdotes took the simplest way to the heart of the matter, and that's something I've encountered very rarely. It's something I respect, and am even a little humbled by.

When someone writes something that gets so close to honesty, and does it as well as Thompson (because I know, through him, exactly what it must have been like to drive up to Jack Nicolson's house in the middle of the night and then shoot guns in the air, fire a rocket, and leave a bloody, half-frozen elk's heart on his doorstep. As a birthday present. And to see nothing wrong with that at all.) I always feel a little bit awed, as if I've just had a religious experience, except it's an experience made for agnostic writers.

In other literary news, I've just finished reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and I highly recommend that bleak, beautiful book. It would make a good movie.

I'm hesitating before diving into The DaVinci Code. I have to read it, because I am now a part of a semi-informal book club with a few friends, and that will be the first book. I'm hesitating, because I'm afraid that it will be a bad book, or worse, a mediocre one, and it will be like seeing the Lord of the Rings movies or the last three seasons of Buffy all over again: ie, where everyone else's opinion is vastly different than mine. I hope that if the book is mediocre, at least one of the book clubbers agrees with me.

Because of work, I'm reading a lot. This is a good thing.

Cheers,

The Magus

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